Tech Note: STAC-A2™ on AWS - Initial Investigations

This Tech Note summarizes STAC's initial examination of Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) products from Amazon Web Services (AWS) under the high-performance analytics use case of STAC-A2. It compares the price-performance of ten different EC2 instance types. It also compares the performance of the fastest EC2 instances to that of standalone systems that STAC has tested. Finally, the Tech Note also describes our experiences trying to configure and optimize some of these EC2 instance types, providing a few tips for engineers embarking on the same kind of exercise. The document has links to detailed test results and configuration information for each instance tested.